The Urgent Matter of Books

So this guy I know, a guy I like, whose brain has not atrophied or anything, says to me the other night, “Books have lost their social relevance; they have been entirely subsumed by economy, and their material form is fast approaching its own demise.”

Huh, I go, and I do what I often do when I’m sitting there totally not agreeing and kind of working my inner Lidia up into a frothy fit—I leave the table we are sitting at and go to my internal reality—I daydream. I conjure up images and worlds to cinematic proportions in my head in place of arguing. Though I continue to smile, nod, and consume the rest of my scotch. In my head though, a whole other reality is raging.

American forces make their way like the outstretched fingers of a hand into the deserts of the Middle East. Members of the religious right and conservatives launch an attack on educators, artists, intellectuals, women and their reproductive rights, homosexuals, and workers who belong to unions. The frontlines are national, cultural, and corporeal. Chernobyl reactor vessels rupture and send mega amounts of radiation into the sky. Land. Water. Food.

Sound familiar?

The years are 1985 to 1991. The presidents are Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Then, I’m a student at the University of Oregon. I’m hella pissed off. The Gulf war is screaming. I wear a white T-shirt with “No Blood For Oil” painted on it with red fingernail polish. One of my teachers, an Arab American, has an ugly slur drawn on her office door and her home is broken into. Another of my teachers, a gay poet, is beaten to a pulp after he teaches “Tongues Untied.” I go down to the courthouse at night to protest our military actions and a large white man with a black cowboy hat calls me a god damn hippie (?) and pops me one in the jaw. I’m on the cover of What’s Happening, holding up a peace sign, crying.

Zeitgeists are funny things. The word “Zeitgeist” implies a spirit of the times, as if each one is distinct. But that isn’t how Zeitgeists work. They surface and submerge, then resurface with slightly different names and faces, like Benjamin’s description of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus.

Flash forward to 2011. Our government just bombed the crap out of Libya in an effort to stop a tyrant dictator. Planned Parenthood, the NEA and NPR are all under the gun as government sponsored frivolities. Education, reproductive rights and unions are under the gun. Speaking of guns, several states are proposing bills to increase gun ownership and usage; some states are attempting to criminalize the bodies of abortion doctors and women who have abortions.

We are under corporeal siege; the bodies of women, children, workers, minorities, immigrants, and gay people are under attack. Art is f’d. Somewhere far away Noam Chomsky is still narrating. I can barely hear him through the white noise that has become my culture.

I know it’s the present tense, but I’ve seen this movie before.

Back to the guy I’m drinking with—back to his proclamation about the use value of books—“Uh huh,” I go. But not really, I think, I drink, I am.

Back then, I protested, and I’m glad I did. But I don’t know what, if any, good it did. There is always the problem of what to “do” in times of national crisis; it’s gotten harder to figure out in our current media saturated, speed centric, uber-fragmented lives. Even back then, there was only one thing I managed to “do” that I think made a radical difference – not in stopping anything terrible that was happening, but in my own consciousness.

I read books.

You heard me. Those thingees with covers and pages that you hold in your hands? Smell like paper and trees? Portable brain defibrillators?

I’m not talking about college assigned books. I’m talking about the books that I found at that time. The books that spoke to me and maybe only me. The books that kept me from sleeping at night so I could read them. The books that haunted me while I walked around during the daytime. And I’m here to tell you I learned more about war, politics, and social and individual identity from reading books than any class I took, any nightly news, and fat-mouthed politician.

And I didn’t just read them. I devoured them. I mean I did everything but chew and gum them to death. I wrote copious marginalia on every page. I took them with me everywhere I went. Including the bathtub. Europe. Bars. Restaurants. Lover’s beds. Those books were beaten up with reading.

I spent hours in the University of Oregon library. I stole several books. I was so into reading them I wanted to bite them. Eat them. They made my brain hurt in the best possible way.

The books that I found, or that maybe found me, if animas can be attributed to books as objects, had a common theme: war. But not necessarily war the way you are imagining. Then, like now, wars had been dispersed and fragmented – so that when we spoke of wars, we meant both all the wars being fought in countries away from ours, and we meant the wars closer to home, the cultural wars, sometimes happening across our very bodies. War, the serial.

Then, like now, the war “out there” had become serialized, mass-produced, technologically directed in a variety of theaters. And of course outside of America, the war was never “out there.”

I watched television and listened to the radio and read the New York Times. But when civilian society has been so utterly saturated by militarism and mediaspeak and consumerism, how do we even distinguish ourselves from the movie of us?

What chance did books have to do anything? What chance do they have now, if we are, as they say, entering the decline of printed words?

Let me tell you what I read.

White Noise by Don Delillo is a novel about a nuclear family’s fear of death, random airborne toxic events, simulated evacuations, and the inability to distinguish words from things.

Empire of the Senseless by Kathy Acker is a novel about a post apocalyptic revolutionary landscape where multimedia corporations and patriarchal figureheads have demolished identity and human relations.

Shikasta by Doris Lessing is a novel about a future earthlike planet that has been colonized and is being documented from afar in order to see what its fate will be under the competing thumbs of complete militarization of civilian society and the possibility of a humanism in touch with earth’s natural resources.

Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Silko is about a future Native American insurrection in a world where water has replaced oil and a violent end to white rule in America is the logical extension of its colonizing beginnings.

It was as if the sky had opened up and the PERFECT BOOKS fell into my hands. Perfect in that they would raise my consciousness about the definition of war.

Listen: I used to think war was a thing governments sanctioned and soldiers fought on battlefields. After reading these books, I understood that in order to understand war, I had to demilitarize my understanding of it and learn to read beyond the sanctioned soldier’s story to get it. Basically to read beyond the paradigms of World War and Vietnam.

Here is what I learned about war from reading these books:

1. War is a structure of consciousness and cultural production.

2. Our very processes of language and psychic and social development already contain within them the very seeds of bellicosity and the archetype of agon. Protagonist. Antagonist. Fight.

3. Battlefields of war are varied and multiple; they can be social, sexual, domestic, even representational.

4. The threat of nuclear annihilation has already been activated by a kind of death that pervades our existence in the form of “news” and consumerism and entertainment that has become a symbolically lethal delivery system.

6. The new forms of resistance will look like hackers, pirates, terrorists, children, women, minorities, the earth.

Any of this sound familiar?

So. I had my consciousness raised. Big time. But even that isn’t the full power of a book.

Right this second, in our current zeitgeist, I want to read every one of those books over again. And about a hundred more. Because after I read the books, it’s like Rilke wrote: You must change your life.

After I read the books, I decided to stop flunking out of college and pursue a PhD. I decided to become a writer and a teacher. I decided I could be a conduit for desire.

Books, like all art, breed in us desire. In times of crisis and fear and misrepresentation we need desire, or else we shut down and hide out in our houses, succumbing to infotainment and the ease of an available latte, turning off our brains and emotions. Books breed desire. Even if, as Jeanette Winterson argues, the responsibility to act remains with us.

So I’m saying hey, your zeitgeist is upon you. And underneath the story of BUY THIS and FEAR THIS and HATE THAT, rising up and punching through the infomercial we call public discourse in a moment of danger is this: read books.

With covers and pages. Read them, rub them on your belly, smell them, chew on them – they are material evidence that we still know how to think and feel.

So what books do I think should be read right this second?

I can’t tell you. You have to find them. Or let them find you. You must gravitate toward the books that will change your life. Right now. You must stop listening to the contemporary double-speak discourse and the dominant modes of entertainment production. You must silence the clicker, take a facehooker break, and put down that latte.

Go to a public library before it gets shut down.

Go to a university library and have sex in the back stacks, then spend the rest of the night with your lover discovering and reading books.

Go to your local independent bookstore and ask them which books they’d like to most hand sell – which books make you feel alive again.

Buy books rather than boots. Beer. An iPad.

People keep telling me that books are in danger of disappearing. E-books, Kindles, iPads will replace the object of the book as we know it. I’m not worried.

The new technologies are pretty cool, to be honest. Very snappy. But until the day when we are cyborg-fitted with our art and literature, I already know why we’ll keep picking up books and putting them in our hands, turning the pages.

In times of crisis, we can still remember them burning.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the novel Dora: A Headcase, a modern farce, and The Chronology of Water. And some other books. She writes and teaches and loves and mothers in Portland, Oregon. "Explicit Violence" will appear in the forthcoming anthology, "Get Out of My Crotch," due from Cherry Bomb Books in 2013, co-edited by Kim Wyatt and Rumpus columnist Sari Botton." You can find her around.
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It’s just a covering of leaves. There are quite a few of us under here. We’ve stripped bare, lit fires, we toast our food. We don’t post lookouts. At the signs of commotion that would bring dogs to alert, graduate their status, we keep right on fucking. We lick each others wounds, we read about preventative care. Gardening. We step out, every now and again, search out more to read. We fill our pockets, our packs, pouches designed to hold water, letters, lamp oil, strawberries and pens. We are hoarders for books. I’m into Paolo Yashvili and the Georgian poets now. I think, don’t worry. We aren’t going anywhere. They’ll burn the whole thing down looking for us, and we will rise out of the ashes every time, write in the ashes again, if we have to.

WOW!! Great read. Thank you! I agree with Laura above that eReading is a reality and while it may not totally replace books, it’s inevitable that it will dominate how the written word will be distributed in the future. Fortunate or unfortunate, the future will be “e” everything.

muchas in the gracias most beautiful humans. the revolution will probably be televised. but keep your berets handy. @jeffrey that is beautiful, what you wrote. @ serah i have emergency jeans too! @ laura ah, i respect what you say, but kindles and ipads create new and differently bodied readers; books create very different readers. the mode of production always creates its reader differently. as i say, i am not anti technology. nor am i sentimentalizing or nostalgic for books. i’m simply calling a materiality i know of that creates a specific reader. love you all! buy books! authors will get on their knees and thank you! so far, our “making” hasn’t been fully taken from us…viva la revolution! progress without the naive fiction that we are moving forward!

I think that the book is actually alive and healthy. I live in Tuscaloosa and surround myself with many, many book arts people. Their presence in my life have taught me the tactile pleasure of paper, smell, rereading, dogearing. The book’s beauty is its tactile heft. I still have an original copy of A FAN’S NOTES where someone had written in the margin, “I hope this gives you some sort of solace.” The handwriting…damn.

What Laura said. It’s what’s in the book that is important, not what it’s made of. We don’t yearn for books written on parchment or vellum, we don’t act like the words mean more if they’re hand-printed on papyrus. I have a book that I would never part with, but it’s not because of what’s in it–it’s because it was the first book of poems I ever bought with my own money, and thus that object has an emotional resonance for me that I can’t have with another book. But the poems in it? I can read those in an anthology, online, or on an iPad and they’ll speak to me just as vividly. Because it’s the words that make the difference, not the format they appear in, at least in the cases of the books mentioned in this piece.

Lidia, I’d be interested to hear what you mean when you say that Kindles and iPads create new and differently bodied readers, because to me, right now, that doesn’t actually mean anything, and I’d like to understand it because I tend to believe that today’s newborns won’t know of any other way to read than on a tablet, because that’s going to be their earliest experiences with the written word. I’d like to know why a book like White Noise will be different for them because they read it on a screen in their hands than it was for you holding the book in your hand, because I think if there’s a difference, it’s going to be in the way the person is reacting to the words, not in the format those words appear in.

Excellent — but you’ve left out the disabled in all of your lists — particularly disabled children whose lives are being battered as never before — so battered that they aren’t even appearing, here, as you hold up the vulnerable. Use your beautiful voice to include and defend children with disabilities and their families — we need it, desperately.

Books can be written on. Brought in the bathtub. You can blow your nose on them. You can rip pages out and give them to people. You can throw them in the bottom of your bag. You can draw in them. You can order them at your library. You can have a collection in your home in a room that makes you feel alive and inspired. You can scan your shelves and decide which one to read depending on your mood. They can be shared. You can leave them places for other people. You can give them to people as gifts. You can make bookmarks for them. Books don’t break. You don’t have to get them fixed. Books are love. My newborn will be reading books.

Lidia, my dear, you have done it again: cracked open the caged minds of those who are not freethinkers, who might have such cultural stigmas re-spewed in the form of “books don’t matter”, or “war is more important than reading”. Two things came to mind when I read this, okay three: the first is YOU ARE BRILLIANTLY BEAUTIFUL. The second was a poem I open every writing workshop with by Margaret Atwood called The True Story. LOVE IT! And the third is a Talking Heads song that I listen to regularly called Crosseyed and Painless…”I’m still waiting, I’m still waiting…” I am so grateful you exist.

I don’t think the e-reader creates a new reader on an individual level, but I get that our culture is formed by how we consume things and receive our information. If we read on an e-reader, we’re susceptible to all kinds of distractions and noise (since it’s connected to the internet), we can’t see how close we are to the end of the book, and it’s that much harder to get through one. It’s also another component of the wireless culture we live in, where we conduct all of our business online, eschewing face-to-face contact–it’s easier to demonize someone that you can’t see; it’s easier to fire someone if you know you’ll never meet them.

Wow, thanks, Lidia. Outstanding! THIS is exactly what I needed to see today. The other day, as I was grumbling over my yet-unfinished project and wondering whether it mattered, I thought of how TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD radically shifted my thoughts about race and justice when I was a young teen. Not that I expect to come close to that–but my point is, when the right book falls into the right hands, change happens. You said it so eloquently and with such passion. Kudos.

I am weeping at my desk. I cannot think of anything to say to show you how much, HOW MUCH this is me, and my unspoken, even un-though-through credo. I have a bookcase in my bathroom for the wrinkled paperbacks I have dropped in the tub. I just carried home another bookcase last night. I mail books every week, get books in the mail every day, spend all my spare income on books, get them anywhere, give them to anyone.

If I could do one thing to change the world right now, on the short list would be this: defund Armed Forces Radio, which pipes in Rush and other gibberish to brainwash the troops. No satellite TV, etc.

Send the troops books that will make them think. Maybe you can’t do that while they’re on the ground. I’ve never been in combat but every thoughtful war novel suggests it would not be possible, that without group think at the unit level survival would not be possible. But the seeds could be planted to harvest a generation of Tim O’Briens instead of a generation of Rush Limbaughs.

Thank you Lidia. This book lover will never give up my addiction. I have committed myself to books and I will continue my commitment to them. Reading isn’t dead, never will be dead, they just flip the page to the next era.

The problem with e-texts is that the publishers may soon turn around and start refusing to publish paper books, just as cassette and vinyl were discontinued. The costs of e-books to the producers are almost nil compared to creating hard copy. They will shrug and say “the world moves on”. They have taken the decision to no longer print the full Oxford English Dictionary – it’s too expensive. We the reader have very little control over the production of the books we have. To say “but e-books are so cool” or” but everyone else is doing it” is to see a very small picture, and to surrender to the Zeitgeist. This is a *valve decision* you make for society. We won’t be able to move back to paper books again. The presses won’t be there, the distribution networks will cease to exist. Your personal consumer choices define if we move to cloud based publishing. Think carefully before you jump.

Span, I think we’re already there to a certain extent, but it’s important to remember that vinyl hasn’t disappeared–it’s just become a niche market. And the same may hold true for paper books. I think the comparison to cassettes doesn’t really work because it was just a crap format–few mourned the death of the 8-track either–but vinyl survived because it had something the cassette lacked, and paper books, in some form, will survive because they have something that e-books lack. But they’re not going to stay the dominant format no matter what, because the cost of printing and shipping books is just too high, and is only going to get higher as resources (fossil fuels, paper, water) get more expensive. The production costs per unit sold of e-books are just too low by comparison.

Very nice essay. In the UK we are also under savage attack from the forces of big money, who either want to get rid of public budgets or move them into private hands for profit. Hundreds of libraries across the country are under threat. I hope it won’t be thought spamming if I link to my blog entry on what libraries mean to me:

I also love books but I love e books too. I love to read. I use my public library a lot. But even before the advent of e readers, books had become too expensive. A paperback novel that was more than $10? That meant out of reach of most people. Stealing books from the library isn’t the answer but how do we make sure that books are available to everybody? Public libraries are part of the answer for sure.

My website The Vortex (Art-Brain-Philosophy Project [http://kayaerbil.org/]) represents my conception of the psychology of the 21st century of reader. I currently have 130 books checked out of the library.

I keep stockpiling and buying. I figure I have enough real books to read for nine years when the whole thing goes digital. (I have a kindle but a real book never runs out of battery. Or randomly restarts.)

i keep forgetting to get my ass back on here and say: i think it’s a false argument. for me there is not ebooks vs. real books. but i did want to talk about war, materiality, how books signify corporeally and symbolically, and the place of the object in the wave of a zeitgeist….LOVE how all your minds work though!!! thank you for playing here with me!!! x to the o to the x and back at the o.

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